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When Was Culture Invented?
No full textImagine that a time machine has set you down in England in the late 14th century, and you bump into Geoffrey Chaucer just as an apple falls from a tree. Before you can exclaim Sir Isaac Newton! Chaucer explains what you\u27ve seen. The ground and the apple partake of the element of earth, he says, which means the apple has a \u27kindly enclyning\u27 for its natural element below. Hanging in the tree, in the higher element of air, had been unnatural for the apple all along. You\u27re dumbfounded at Chaucer\u27s explanation. What about gravity? But try as you might, you cannot drive into his mind the fact that the mass of the earth exerts a force upon the apple. You return to the 21st century shaking your head: If narrow-minded people like Chaucer helped forge our culture, it\u27s no wonder things are as mad as they are today
Prenatal Mindfulness Education and Childbirth Outcomes
Get PDFIntroduction: Mindfulness-based childbirth education focuses on supporting normal physiologic labor and birth. This article presents the findings of an integrative review examining the relationship between prenatal mindfulness education and childbirth outcomes through the theoretical framework lens of the Roy Adaptation Model. Methods: A literature review of PubMed and CINAHL was completed to identify original studies. The database search included articles published between 2011 and 2022. Article inclusion criteria specified original research, randomized controlled trials, qualitative studies, and pilot randomized controlled studies. Article exclusion criteria specified integrative reviews, systematic reviews, other non-experimental studies, and non-English language reports. Studies pertaining specifically to perinatal or postpartum mental health were excluded from review. A hand search of all applicable reviews was conducted along with a hand search of relevant journals published between 2011 to 2022. Results: The search resulted in 36 articles after removal of duplicates. After a review of abstracts and full-texts, seven articles met the criteria for inclusion. An additional three articles were included from citation hand search. Findings from these ten articles indicated a correlation between prenatal mindfulness education and improved childbirth outcomes or satisfaction. Participants endorsed higher childbirth self-efficacy, decreased opioid analgesia use, higher sense of control, and decreased levels of fear, anxiety, or distress. Discussion: Using the Roy Adaptation Model to examine the effects of prenatal mindfulness and childbirth outcomes highlights the many ways in which mindfulness-based childbirth education can impact birth outcomes and satisfaction. A lack of research pertaining to mindfulness and its relationship to childbirth should be addressed. Nurse-midwives should encourage patients desiring an unmedicated or physiologic birth to pursue prenatal mindfulness education
Parent Experience in Preschool Special Education Classroom Setting Decisions
Get PDFEarly childhood is a crucial time in a child\u27s development and is often the entry point for a child experiencing developmental delays in the special education process. Parents play an essential role in the special education process as the child\u27s primary caregivers. This study examined the decision-making process of economically disadvantaged Black and Hispanic/Latinx parents as they provide input on classroom setting decisions during preschool IEP creation. Through in-depth interviews, parents shared their lived experiences as they navigated the special education process and made decisions on classroom settings as part of the IEP team. Document analysis provided additional context in which parents made their decisions. The study found that parents had limited understanding of resources, lacked opportunities for collaboration, did not have knowledge about exclusionary settings, and built their own knowledge about exclusionary settings through personal experience. Based on these findings, policy and practice recommendations were made to support economically disadvantaged Black and Hispanic/Latinx parents to achieve active, informed participation in the IEP decision-making process. Active and informed parents may play a crucial role in disrupting the status quo of disproportionality in preschool special education. Educator training, diverse assessments, parents\u27 access to advocates, and case studies were all areas in need of future research
Teacher Burnout
Get PDFEvery year thousands of teachers across the world leave the classroom due to teacher burnout. Teacher burnout syndrome is the emotional and physical exhaustion originating from excessive job stress. Burnout originates from excessive workloads, toxic environments, student behaviors, lack of autonomy, or being under an administrations microscope. Mounting stress causes teachers to feel undervalued and unsupported. Burnout causes health issues in teachers ranging from anxiety and depression to cardiovascular diseases and/or death. This thesis reviews published literature focused on teacher burnout and effective programs to address teacher stress. Implementing effective programs to address teacher stress results in healthier staff, reduced burnout, and increased teacher retention
Some NP-complete edge packing and partitioning problems in planar graphs
No full textGraph packing and partitioning problems have been studied in many contexts, including from the algorithmic complexity perspective. Consider the packing problem of determining whether a graph contains a spanning tree and a cycle that do not share edges. Bernáth and Király proved that this decision problem is NP-complete and asked if the same result holds when restricting to planar graphs. Similarly, they showed that the packing problem with a spanning tree and a path between two distinguished vertices is NP-complete. They also established the NP-completeness of the partitioning problem of determining whether the edge set of a graph can be partitioned into a spanning tree and a (not-necessarily spanning) tree. We prove that all three problems remain NP-complete even when restricted to planar graphs
Disproportionality in Special Education: A Majority of Minority Students in Special Education
Get PDFDisproportionality in special education has been discussed, written about among scholars, authors, and has been debated in courts for over four decades. Minority groups that are most often referred to in this context are African Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans. Disproportionate representation means that the percentage of these groups in special education differs significantly in proportion to their percentage enrollment in the general school population. This paper discusses the over-representation of children of color, particularly African Americans, in some special education disability categories, such as learning disabilities and emotional behavioral disorders
Differentiated Instruction: A Unit Planning Guide to Support Implementation
Get PDFClassrooms today are filled with diversity in a plethora of spectrums. Students differ in ability, interests, learning styles, cultural backgrounds, and many other ways. In addition, teachers have been tasked with meeting the needs of all students to help them succeed regardless of their differences. Differentiated instruction was developed in order to meet this need, but its use is not consistent from classroom to classroom. This paper analyzes the effectiveness of differentiated instruction, the barriers teachers face in implementing differentiated instruction, and strategies to incorporate differentiated strategies in a classroom. A differentiated unit planning guide was created and is shared to help teachers implement differentiated instruction more effectively
Brain-Based Learning Methods and Student Achievement
Get PDFEducators often ask themselves, “What is the most effective way to impart knowledge to my students?” All teachers are faced with the weighty responsibility of providing high-quality learning experiences for their students. Part of a high-quality learning environment consists of creating engaging, meaningful, and real-world content for students to interact with. Taking into account how the brain best receives, processes, and stores information, brain-based learning is one of the most powerful techniques teachers can incorporate into their daily instruction. Brain-based learning is about learning by doing. It includes a variety of strategies, such as hands-on activities, projects or presentations, movement, music, and student-centered lessons. Brain-based learning also provides a space for students to grow socially and emotionally, through discussions and interactions with their peers and teachers, as well as cognitively, through making connections and thinking innovatively. Brain-based strategies are linked to higher student achievement in the classroom, as well as a significant increase in student motivation, engagement, and overall success in an educational setting
The Impact of the Pandemic on Social Emotional Learning
Get PDFThe COVID-19 pandemic declared in March of 2020 disrupted the landscape of education and presented students and teachers with unforeseen impacts and obstacles. Notably, negative social and emotional issues arose as these changes drove students into isolation from peers and school staff amid concerns about the health of themselves and the people they love. Social emotional learning (SEL) supports academics, mental health, and healthy relationships (Rosenbalm, 2021). The pandemic caused a decline in each of these areas, as well as an increase in anxiety and depression among students, and limited the ability of educators to support social emotional learning. As anxiety and depression rose alarmingly in students, educators worried about how to support their mental and social health. Teachers had difficulty simply contacting students, regardless of the technological inequities, difficulties, and adaptations they were required to implement without standardized training on an incredibly short notice. As a result, educator morale, efficiency, and passion also waned. Despite these challenges, researchers have provided existing evidence-based solutions as well as general recommendations to implement stronger SEL programming to support students both during this crisis and in the future
Longitudinal associations for right-wing authoritarianism, social justice, and compassion among seminary students
No full textReligious/spiritual communities in the United States hold significant differences in the relative valuing of social order and progress toward social justice, and religious/spiritual leaders play an influential role in fostering those values. This recognition has prompted calls for theological education to revise the process of student formation, equipping them to address an increasingly diverse social world and the social disparities within their larger communities. Right-wing authoritarianism tends to be associated with a preference for social order and various forms of prejudice, and negatively associated with prosocial attitudes and behaviors. However, there is a limited amount of research examining associations between right-wing authoritarianism and the prosocial constructs of social justice commitment and compassion. The present study explored the longitudinal associations between right-wing authoritarianism, social justice commitment, and compassion in a sample of graduate students from 18 Christian seminaries across North America over two and a half years of their education (N = 580; Mage = 31.50; 47.3% female; 62.9% White). Longitudinal data analysis indicated that right-wing authoritarianism exerted a negative influence on social justice commitment and compassion, during the initial time interval which then faded over time. Results also indicated a reciprocal process among right-wing authoritarianism and social justice commitment. Practical implications centered on the potential for interventions targeting the reduction of right-wing authoritarianism to increase social justice commitment and compassion, and interventions targeting greater social justice commitment to lower right-wing authoritarianism